Last summer, Creative Commons had the pleasure of having Fred Benenson as its first Free Culture intern. Fred was tasked with coming up with interesting or cool ways to get out Creative Commons’ message but on a grass roots level. Fred created a very sexy media kit that Free Culture members can give to bands…

Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer are the members of The Lonely Island, an LA-based comedy collective, who have released much of their music and video shorts online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Also known as “the dudes”, Andy, Jorma and Akiva soon found that they were developing a fan base, some of…

by Ethan Smith, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal For some people, the future of copyright law is here, and it looks a lot like Gilberto Gil. The Brazilian singer-songwriter plans to release a groundbreaking CD this winter, which will include three of his biggest hits from the 1970s. It isn’t the content of…

Magnatune provides “Internet music without the guilt.” Based in Berkeley, California, Magnatune is a record label with a 21st Century business model, offering consumers a unique mix of free and paid music. One of the first for-profit companies to adopt Creative Commons’ copyright licenses into its strategy, Magnatune has amassed both an impressive buzz and…

Ryan Junell, who animated our Get Creative and Reticulum Rex videos is now spearheading a Slow Motion Video contest. You too can create “a video experience that isn’t afraid to put a 78 record on at 33 1/3rd and kick back in a beanbag to ponder the mysteries of space and time.” Here’s how. All…

Week before last, Creative Commons South Africa officially launched at the Commons-Sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons conference in Johannesburgh. The launch event and conference, primarily organized by Heather Ford, South Africa Project Lead, and Andrew Rens, South Africa Legal Lead, was nothing short of spectacular. The launch event on the night preceeding the…

Yahoo! has added a forum to support Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons. If you have questions or feedback for Yahoo! concerning this service, now you have a place to ask. See this post introducing Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons. Today Yahoo! also took their video search out of beta. You can’t (yet — hint, hint!)…

Ryan Junell and I first met at the University of Texas, where we both took a class about the Internet (Ryan designed UT’s first web site; I caught on more slowly) and saw each other at a lot of rock shows. It wasn’t until Creative Commons started up and needed a graphic designer that Ryan…

Remix Reading is holding a remix competition. Here’s an excerpt from their site: After an extremely successful launch event, Remix Reading is pushing the boundaries of the local cultural community with a remix competition. Over the next month, we want to see who can create the best remix of a piece of work already on…

Earlier this spring, Creative Commons staff went down to Brazil to oversee the launch of one of the first country-specific licenses. There was a big event attended by Gilberto Gil, the Minister of Culture for Brazil, and a film crew followed everyone around for a couple days. The result is a nice little 11 minute…